“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” — Mark Fisher
I would self-identify as a treehugger, which in one sense means an environmentalist, but it also refers to the way managers used to derogatorily speak about corporate retreats where workers “recharge” and perform “team-building” activities such as hugging trees together. I led retreats at the Esalen Institute for ten years so I’m extremely familiar with a wide array of uplifting exercises to help rejuvenate people’s spirits.
Earlier today I heard a patient identify himself as a jobhugger. His job is unsatisfying and he’s burnt-out; however, for PMCs (the Professional Managerial Class) like him, especially given our turbulent economy with the possibility of AI replacement looming, he knows it might be difficult to find a similarly paying job elsewhere. So he’s jobhugging.
At the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, my sociology professor E. Digby Baltzell once said in class that workers ride an escalator up until they find their level of mediocrity and then usually become somewhat complacent. A certain level of financial success can reduce the drive of some people. Now that we’re 60 years old, some of my Penn colleagues report having Golden Handcuffs – a highly monthly nut including mortgages and kids at private schools – that makes it impossible for them to retire early; however, at this juncture in the history of capitalism, it appears that many young people including my aforementioned patient now suffer from having Bronze Handcuffs.
It used to be called “Quiet Quitting”; now it looks more like a détente between the C-suite and the PMCs, everyone holding onto steady paychecks until the AI chips fall where they may. So jobhugging is the current workplace trend where people cling to their current roles out of fear rather than career satisfaction. Instead of trying to job hop for better pay, employees prioritize the security of a steady paycheck over the risk of finding a new job in our slower, less predictable market.
Psychologically, jobhugging feels somewhat vengeful to me, but it’s also in line with what Karl Marx prophesied as the alienation and disenfranchisement of laborers. And let’s be honest: PMCs are mostly sitting in front of computers staring at numbers, words, and charts and taking Zoom meetings for eight to twelve hours a day. It sounds better than working the floor at a Foxconn factory, but no matter how much one is paid, spending 80% of your waking hours in front of screens has to be soul-crushing.
Jobhugging is like going on strike without holding a sign in front of a picket line. Showing up for the bare minimum hours, putting in the bare minimum effort, and still collecting the paycheck and the benefits.
Professor Catherine Liu argues that PMCs’ defining move is to convert their own economic anxiety into a performance of competence, mistaking managed frenetic affect and appearing to be “crazybusy” for actually contributing in a meaningful way. Jobhugging is that same inauthentic mechanism running at a slower cadence. This is the class that believed the meritocracy myth of the Protestant work ethic (work hard and you will be rewarded) when it engendered their own commitment, but now all of that hard work is remembered as hazing and exploitation. So naturally getting a few months of extra pay out of a morally bankrupt corporation feels just and right.
AI doesn’t just threaten to replace the PMC. It exposes the fiction that undergirded the entire arrangement – that the PMC’s value was never intrinsic, it was only priced according to market rates, and always revocable by a board of directors or a C-suite exec, maybe someone they never even met. Quiet quitting and jobhugging are two expressions of the same psychological desire to correct the cosmic injustices imbued by what we consider to be “normal” capitalistic interactions.
What we’re seeing throughout the Professional Managerial Class is a profound rise in Bronze Handcuffs. Cheaper than gold but just as psychologically constraining. Sitting in front of a screen for 8-12 hours per day ain’t what it used to be.